"Your beautiful sleep-walker's eyes. . . . Show us a little of what's in there. . . . What are you dreaming, Annette? Tell me, tell me! Tell what you're dreaming. Tell! Come along, let's hear!" "What do you want me to tell?" "Say what you are thinking about." Annette resisted, but she always ended by yielding. For both of them it was an acute pleasure of affection, and perhaps of egotism, to tell each other everything. They left nothing out. So Annette tried to unravel her dreams, much less for Sylvie's benefit than for her own comfort. She explained, not without difficulty, but with a great scrupulousness and seriousness that made Sylvie burst into laughter, all her mad thoughts--the innocent, the candid, the grotesque, the daring, and sometimes even . . . "Well, well, Annette! I say, when you try! . . ." exclaimed Sylvie, pretending to be scandalized. Her own inner life was perhaps no less strange (neither more nor less than that of all of us), but she did not suspect it, and she was not interested in it, like a practical little person who believes once for all in what she sees and touches, in the sensible and ordinary dream of superficial earthly existence, and who avoids as absurd everything that might disturb it. She laughed with all her heart, listening to her sister. Now who would ever have thought that of Annette! With her innocent air, she sometimes tells you the most egregious things in all seriousness. And then she is frightened at the simplest things, that everybody knows. (She shared them with Sylvie, with a comical conviction.) Heaven knows what ridiculous ideas are passing in her noddle! . . . Sylvie found her complicated, adorable, twisted, deucedly tangled up. Always that disease of being tormented to death by things that one should take as they come! "The trouble is that they sing a half-a-dozen tunes at the same time," said Annette. "Well, that's amusing," exclaimed Sylvie. "It's like the Lion de Béfort fair." "Horrors!" cried Annette, stuffing up her ears. "Why, I adore it. Three or four shooting galleries, tram horns, steam calliopes, bells, whistles, everyone yelling together, till one can't hear oneself think, while one yells louder than all of them,--and snorting, laughing and goings on that delight your heart. . . ." "Little plebeian!" "But, my little aristo, it's you (you've just said so), it's you who are like that! If you don't like it, you have only to do as I do. I have everything in order. Everything in its place. Every rabbit in its hutch!" And indeed she spoke the truth. Whatever hubbub went on in the Place Denfert or in her own little brain, she knew how to manage in one case as well as the other. She could instantly bring order from the most inextricable disorder. She knew how to reconcile all her divers needs, both of mind and body, middle class and otherwise. Each had its pigeon-hole. As Annette said to her: